Forum Overview :: Rants :: It's a solution to a problem that we don't actually have.

[quote name="blackwater"]UBI advocates envision a world where technology has made most human labor obsolete. But not all human labor-- in this scenario, we still have an economy that we want to maintain, where a small number of highly productive people make a positive contribution to society. Let's call this the Jetsons scenario. Everyone has a robot butler, that they can trust just as much as a human butler. But George Jetson still goes to work to get yelled at by his tubby little boss. This scenario is almost certainly not what's going to happen. Of course artificial intelligence may eventually surpass human intelligence. But if it does, AIs are going to shoot way past human levels of intelligence. They're not going to be butlers taking orders from us to do manual labor, but unable to do the more complicated jobs. Think about it. Even if AIs are only as intelligent as humans on average (which is itself very unlikely) we can pick and choose what AIs we want to copy. Imagine if you could make a million copies of Albert Einstein. At that point, the AIs become the economy and probably also the government. They're not going to be taking orders from AOC or Joe Biden. Meanwhile, back in the actual world, productivity is plummeting. It takes years and mountains of money to build a tiny new extension to the New York subway. The ratio of administrators to faculty at colleges is shooting way up compared to decades ago. Projects like building high speed rail in California take literally generations, if they can even get built at all. And all the advances in computer technology have only led to more people employed in that sector, not fewer. Self-driving cars have been 5 years away for 10 years now. The reality is slowly sinking in even in Silicon Valley that legal considerations will probably prevent fully driverless cars from being deployed in our lifetime. We may yet see more automation in sectors like factory work and in agriculture. But employment in those sectors is already very low. For sectors like child care, teaching, police work, emergency services, hospital work, etc. etc. we are nowhere near having a robot that can usefully contribute. And even if we were, we would not be able to legally deploy that robot anyway for the same reason driverless cars failed. We don't need UBI. We need to start sending more people to trade school so that we can have the next generation of welders and plumbers. We need to start slimming down bloated humanities programs that have terrible life outcomes for everyone involved.[/quote]